The Historiographical and Theological Errors of the Antioch Declaration
21 November 2024
A number of prominent pastors, including Joe Boot, Jeff Durbin, Andrew Sandlin, James White, and Doug Wilson have authored a statement on “racial ideologies threatening the church” entitled The Antioch Declaration, along with a German Baptist pastor named Tobias Riemenshneider. Riemenschneider being listed as one of the authors is significant, and requires giving a brief overview of the background to this statement released yesterday.
So, a few weeks ago Riemenschneider released a podcast in which he critiqued one of the authors of the Statement on Christian Nationalism, pastor Joel Webbon. The issue here had been a member of Webbon’s congregation who shared a politically-incorrect meme with regard to the Nazi’s battle with the Jews during World War Two. The man in question was formerly a member of Riemenschneider’s congregation and is now at Webbon’s church. Now the dispute and the matter should of course have been handled privately, but the fact is that Riemenscheimer saw the opportunity to discredit one of the most prominent advocates of Christian Nationalism, labelling him “a key proponent” of “an evil development in the Reformed Church” and he called for Webbon to face church discipline. As evidence Riemenschneider played a clip of Webbon asking questions about the mainline holocaust narrative. This is what he defines as hatred of the Jews and anti-semitism. It is therefore clear that Riemenscheider’s position is that members of Christian churches who even question the post-World War II consensus are to face church discipline.
What is noteworthy here is the fact that Riemenschneider and all those who supported him in his calls to have Webbon excommunicated, including Doug Wilson and James White, would effectively also excommunicate RJ Rushdoony from their church, as he also questioned the official, mainstream narrative of the holocaust. They would furthermore also excommunicate one of the great Reformed Philosophers of the twentieth century, HG Stoker, who, despite holding a chair as professor of Christian Philosophy at Potchefstroom University, was detained and interned in a camp by the South African government for refusing to support the Allied cause against Germany.
Riemenschneider shamelessly slandered Webbon using the Marxist playbook. Even Eschatology Matters, who gave him the platform to do the podcast, later expressed their regret at doing so and admitted that it “led to unnecessary slander and speculation against a fellow Christian pastor, Joel Webbon.”
Yet, instead of issuing an apology to Webbon, Riemenschneider and those who publicly supported his attacks on Webbon have now come out with their own declaration, with which we will now deal.
Given the nature of Riemenschneider’s attacks on Webbon, the declaration naturally places a lot of emphasis on historical interpretation. Early on the authors of the statement affirm that
if the superabundant, diverse forms and veritable glut of evidence – detailed in diaries, documented records, firsthand testimonies of eyewitnesses, extensive photography and videography all provided within living memory – for the deliberate mass destruction of millions of Jews by the Nazis does not amount to historical certitude for what specialists call the Holocaust, then the science of history itself is called into question.
Regardless of what one believes regarding World War II, this claim alone reveals the pseudo-scientific nature of the Antioch Declaration as a whole. After all, the striving towards objectivity that characterized modern historiography up until the 1970s—which the authors of the declaration here seem to try to revive—lost all credibility in light of damning criticism by influential philosophers like Jürgen Habermas. Postmodern approaches to historiography like that of philosophers of history Hayden White and Louis Mink were consequently developed during this time in reaction to positivism. These postmodern approaches purposefully strove to avoid the Enlightenment ideal of "historiographical objectivity" and were characterized by a constructivist view of historiographical literature, wherein historical narratives construct an independent reality without any relation to historical truth or even historical reality outside of the text itself. Of course this is just as absurd as the positivism which preceded it and so by the end of the twentieth century the American philosopher of history David Carr emerged as one of the most renowned critics of postmodern historiography, maintaining the emphasis on the narrative nature of historiography, but within the framework of a phenomenological approach known as narrative realism—contrasting with the narrative anti-realism characteristic of postmodern historiography. Carr proposes narrative as inherent to all human interaction with reality rather than something separated from or imposed upon reality. Narrative, in other words, provides the framework that supplies sense and meaning to human experience. The reality of the presuppositional lenses with which historians inescapably approach the sources was especially brought to light in the 1990s in the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s famous critique of Francis Fukuyama’s historical theory as fundamentally based on eschatological commitments.
This is to say that the Antioch Declaration's claim that historical sources such as diaries and testimonies in and of themselves should effectuate "historical certitude" is a denial of the reality of the interpretative framework in which the sources are viewed—now almost universally recognized by all historians. Not only is this evident in the diverging interpretations of historians from different schools, but as a Christian historian, I, for example, could never embrace the Post-World War II narrative that the World War II Holocaust is the greatest injustice ever perpetuted, as it cannot ever possibly compare to the suffering of Jesus Christ at the hands of Jews and Romans. The importance of recognizing this is amplified by the former French Professor of Literature at Lyon University, Robert Faurisson's statement regarding the religious implications of this narrative:
The Six Million constitute a lay religion with its own dogma, commandments, decrees, prophets, high priests and Saints: Saint Anne (Frank), Saint Simon (Wiesenthal), Saint Elie (Wiesel). It has its holy places, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It has its temples and its relics (bars of soap, piles of shoes, etc.), its martyrs, heroes, miracles and miraculous survivors (millions of them), its golden legend and its righteous people. Auschwitz is its Golgotha, Hitler is its Satan. It dictates its law to the nations. Its heart beats in Jerusalem, at the Yad Veshem monument … Although it is largely an avatar of the Hebraic religion, the new religion is quite recent and has exhibited meteoric growth … Paradoxically, the only religion to prosper today is the “Holocaust” religion, ruling, so to speak, supreme and having those sceptics who are openly active cast out from the rest of mankind: it labels them “deniers”, whilst they call themselves “revisionists.”1
Furthermore, the Antioch Declaration's denial of the existence of "a global Jewish conspiracy to corrupt and destroy Western society" has serious implications for our covenantal obligations to our children. First of all it must be said that a biblical view of providence and history entails the recognition of conspiracies (see Psalm 2). Furthermore, the role of Jewish people in subverting Western Christian culture since the Second World War has been extensively documented. For example, Luke Ford, an Australian-American columnist specializing in pornography, published a book in 2004 entitled XXX-Communicated: A Rebel without a Shul, a memoir of his time in the industry, in which he recalls a conversation he had in 1998 with Alvin Goldstein, one of the pioneers of the hardcore pornography industry in the United States. During the interview Ford asked Goldstein why Jewish people were drastically overrepresented in the pornography industry. Goldstein answered:
The only reason that Jews are in pornography is because we believe that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism. Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream—and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPS [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants]—its subversive character becomes more charged.
Goldstein could hardly have spelled out the purposes behind the Cultural Marxist infiltration and takeover of the entertainment industry and the Jewish role in that takeover in any clearer terms. This takeover of the entertainment industry in general, and the rise of the pornography industry in particular, has proven to be one of the most effective and devastating strategies of subversion ever to be employed by the left. Part of our covenantal responsibility to our children is to make this known to them, lest they run the very real risk of growing up thinking that the degeneracies promoted by the entertainment industry and in the public schools are normal and consequently become apostate. Our children need to learn to hate the sins subversively being promoted in our society today and in order to do so they must be made aware of this conspiracy.
The error of the Antioch Declaration with regard to covenant theology is furthermore evident in its affirmation "that the ultimate bond or good for temporal human life is not grounded in absolute loyalty to blood and soil, family or nation, but in the totalizing bond of the Kingdom of God through the Covenant of Grace." The heterodox doctrine of Propositional Covenantalism espoused here denies the very real significance of God-given covenantal structures as part of God's redemptive plan and is at odds with the historic Covenantal or Federal theology set forth in the Reformed Confessions and articulated by Herman Bavinck as follows:
God does not manifest his covenant of grace by ripping people away from their humanity and establishing a covenantal community outside of our natural state, but He brings that covenant into humanity itself, makes it part of the world, and ensures that it remains protected from evil in this world. As Redeemer, God follows the same path he does as Creator and Ruler of all things. Grace is something different to nature, but it joins with nature so as not to destroy it but rather to renew it. Grace is not an inheritance that is acquired by virtue of natural descent, but it is covenantally maintained through the natural relations embedded in human nature. The covenant of grace does not randomly jump to and from one individual to the next, but is maintained through families, races, and nations in an organic fashion.2
Ultimately the historiographical and theological errors of the Antioch Declaration spoils the document, effectively nullifying the good affirmations and denials it otherwise contains. For a detailed critique of the declaration, also see our research fellow, Pastor Bret McAtee's newly-released series on Iron Ink.
1 Robert Faurisson, The secular religion of “the Holocaust”, a tainted product of consumer society (Robert Fourisson: Le Blog Inofficiel, 2008). URL: http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/2009/03/secular-religion-of-holocaust-tainted.html.
2. Bavinck, H. 1914. Handleiding bij het onderwijs in den Christelijke godsdienst. Kampen: Kok.